TERRAFORMING TERRA
We discuss and comment on the role agriculture will play in the containment of the CO2 problem and address protocols for terraforming the planet Earth.
A model farm template is imagined as the central methodology. A broad range of timely science news and other topics of interest are commented on.

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Climate Smart Agriculture

This article is all about
salvaging the carbon credit markets that have so far failed miserably.I posted on this particular approach when I first
began this blog but now think that the vastly better solution is to simply
encourage a biochar protocol which is also easy and cheap to monitor.

It also hugely reinvigorates the
economic health of the soils and is easily justified on its own.

This report is really more about
the blind rush for money, than any semblance of a viable system that will
increase the carbon content of all soils. In the five years that I have been
monitoring the situation, the level of scientific discourse has barely made it
out of high school.

It certainly has failed to leap
on biochar since there is no way to actually tax it or patent it.Yet it solves every issue once and for all.

Can ‘Climate-Smart’ Agriculture Help Both Africa
and the Planet?

One idea promoted at the Durban
talks was “climate-smart agriculture," which could make crops less
vulnerable to heat and drought and turn depleted soils into carbon sinks.

The World Bank and African leaders are backing this new approach, but
some critics are skeptical that it will benefit small-scale African farmers.

The glacial pace of international efforts to curb climate change continued at
the UN climate talks in Durban,
South Africa
last week. Governments concluded that by 2015 they should agree on legally
binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions that involve all major nations —
including China, India and the United States. But they also agreed
that those targets would probably not come into force until 2020.

The climate isn’t waiting for the diplomats. Most experts agree that by 2020 it
will likely be too late to halt dangerous warming above two degrees Celsius. So
the race is now on to find new, unconventional initiatives to fill the gap. One
possibility that came to the fore in Durban is
fixing some of that carbon dioxide in the soils of Africa.
And that is why the continent’s political leaders met in Durban to launch an initiative known,
somewhat cryptically, as “climate-smart” agriculture.

The new buzz phrase went down well. Host president Jacob Zuma extolled it. Kofi
Annan, the Ghanaian former UN secretary-general, praised it as a panacea to Africa’s problems. “Till now agriculture has been
sidelined from climate change discussions,” he said. “But Africa has a huge potential to mitigate climate change.”
Beside him sat the Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, the chair of the
African Union Commission. They were all on hand as the World Bank announced
plans to turn climate-smart agriculture into the next big thing for the world
market in carbon offsets.

So what exactly is climate-smart agriculture? It sounds as if it might involve
making agriculture resilient to climate change, by making soils and crops less
vulnerable to droughts and heat waves. And that is part of the plan. But only
part. The real prize — the one that can lure private finance — is the potential
for carbon offsetting. If farm soils can be used to soak up carbon dioxide
from the atmosphere, then they can generate carbon credits that can be sold to
industrial polluters who want to offset their emissions.

The offer from the world of carbon finance to poor farmers in Africa and elsewhere is this: Let us use your soils to
capture carbon from the atmosphere, and we will, in return, make those soils
more productive and less vulnerable to the climate.

This is a big deal. Nurturing the organic matter in soils on the world’s farms
has as much potential to absorb carbon dioxide emissions from industrialized
countries as the much better-known plans to fund forest conservation, such as
REDD. Rattan Lal of the Ohio
Agricultural Research and Development Center at OhioStateUniversity suggests soils worldwide
could capture as much as a billion tons of carbon a year — more than a tenth of
man-made emissions.

Climate-smart agriculture neatly combines the twin goals of today’s climate
negotiators, helping to prevent climate change while at the same time adapting
farms to inevitable change.

Africa is the big prize. Its farmers are more
vulnerable than any others to climate change. Some estimates suggest a hotter,
more dire world could cut African farm yields by as much as 20 percent by
mid-century. Without an African green revolution, that would spell
disaster for a continent with a population that is expected to double to two
billion people.

But the continent’s huge land area — greater than the U.S., China, India,
Mexico and Japan combined — also holds huge potential as a planetary carbon
sink that, many believe, could create the necessary green revolution.

Currently, African soils are leaking carbon as they erode and lose organic
matter due to bad farming practices. An estimated 43 percent of Africa’s greenhouse gas emissions come from land
clearance, including farming. But the same soils could be turned from a carbon
source to a carbon sink, absorbing many tens of millions of tons of carbon a
year, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization(FAO).

If an agricultural carbon offset program were in place, carbon dollars from
Western companies could pay for composting, mulching, recycling crop waste,
planting farm trees, and much else on the world’s poorest farms. Those improved
soils, richer in organic matter, would grow more crops, help soils withstand
droughts and floods, and — vital to earning those carbon dollars — capture
carbon from the atmosphere.

The World Bank is keen to mastermind a global effort to fix carbon in African
soils. It brought agriculture ministers from across the continent to Johannesburg in September to promote the idea and
continued to push it in Durban.

For the past year, the bank’s BioCarbon
Fund, which sets up demonstration carbon-capturing projects in both forests
and farms, has been running the first pilot African soil project among
smallholder farmers near Kisumu in western Kenya. The bank’s climate envoy
Andrew Steer said in Durban
that the maize and bean farmers “are getting higher yields, improving the
resilience of the soils to drought and getting stronger soils that sequester
more carbon.”

If all goes according to plan, the Kenya Agricultural Carbon Project, which covers 40,000
hectares of farmland in a densely population region of the country, should
capture 60,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year. It could also increase annual
farm incomes by $200 to $400 per hectare.

That’s the plan. Will it work? The Stockholm Environment Institute, a think
tank that looks at both climate and development issues, is supportive. The
institute’s Olivia Taghioff, who has studied the Kenyan scheme, says, “Carbon
finance even in modest amounts can make a big difference for smallholders.”

But there are concerns. In Durban,
Annan warned: “These efforts must have at their heart smallholder farmers.
Without their participation we will fail.” And many critics fear that
climate-smart agriculture is in reality a Trojan horse for marginalizing
smallholder farmers. They believe the arrival of carbon markets, brokers and
traders in the fields of Africa can do nothing
but harm.

“Soil carbon offsets will promote a spate of African land grabs and put
farmers under the control of fickle carbon markets,” said Teresa Anderson
of the UK-based Gaia
Foundation, an NGO that promotes indigenous farming, speaking in Durban. “The [World]
Bank’s agenda is more money for the bank and for carbon project developers, not
development,” said Doreen Stabinsky of the Minneapolis-based Institute for
Agriculture and Trade Policy.

The high costs of employing scientists, consultants, and field surveyors to
assess and monitor the carbon uptake of farm soils will make it impossible for
smallholder farmers to pocket any income from the sale of the carbon absorbed
by their soils, these critics maintain. Only large landowners will be able to
reduce these transactions costs sufficiently to profit from the carbon markets,
they say, and the result will be a new phase of land grabbing. “Soil grabbing,”
some are calling it.

Across Africa, governments are already
leasing wide areas of land traditionally used by smallholder farmers to foreign
companies for industrial agriculture or for planting trees as carbon sinks in
order to gain carbon credits. The fear is that the process will accelerate if
the soil itself becomes a carbon commodity.

This is insane of course.Just what happens to these small holders/

There is another reason why peasant farmers may lose out. Early evidence
gathered by the World Bank in Kenya suggests that the cultivation of commercial
crops of the kind that large agribusinesses specialize in have a much greater
potential to soak up carbon than smallholder subsistence crops.

In Africa and elsewhere, burgeoning
population growth threatens to overwhelm already over-stretched food supply
systems. But, Fred Pearce writes, the next agricultural revolution
needs to get local — and must start to see rising populations as potentially
part of the solution.

Data presented last year at the FAO in Rome by Rama Reddy of the World
Bank’s carbon finance unit show that the carbon-capture potential for a hectare
of smallholder maize in Kenya is around half a ton of carbon dioxide per year,
whereas the potential for commercial biofuels is between 2.5 and 5 tons, and
for a sugar cane plantation up to 8 tons per hectare.

The dream of enthusiasts for climate-smart agriculture is that investors will
one day invest billions of dollars in the fields of Africa
in order to purchase the resulting credits from capturing carbon, while at the
same time improving the continent’s soils. In truth, any credible solution to
climate change will probably involve finding ways to get the landscape to
absorb more carbon, whether in trees or soils, probably financed from carbon
markets. Can it be done in a way that helps smallholder farmers? Or will it
drive them off their land? That remains far from clear.

About Me

Apr 2017 - 4.1 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO rigorously described, September 2010 I am pleased to report that my essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS' has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) and appeared in their June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in relativity,as well as differential geometry(pure math) and of course analysis. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift&. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data and record impressions and interpretations on material read. Do join my blog and receive Four items of interest daily Monday through Saturday.